>>24799722
>Those who have their noses buried in a book are not living. This passion is for the mentally ill. Both failure and success alike in the arts are sick and demented. It is not limited to literature. It takes a sick man to spend his days shaping stone into a breast, a depiction of rape, to paint hell. No healthy, reasonable person does this.

'... what is supposed to be beautiful just because it is alive, is for that reason already what is ugly. The concept of life in its abstraction, to which recourse is made here, is by no means to be separated from what is repressive, relentless, truly deadly and destructive. The cult of life in itself always amounts to that of these forces. Whatever the expression of life may mean, from brimming fertility and the frenetic drives of children, all the way to the competence of those who cobble together something correctly and the high spirits of the wife, who is idolized because appetite shows in her so unreservedly – all of this, taken absolutely, has something of the taking away of the light from others, of what is possible, in blind self-perpetuation. Rampant health as such is always already sickness. Its antidote is sickness which is conscious of itself, the delimitation of life itself. Beauty is such healing sickness. It arrests life and thereby its decay. However if one denied sickness for the sake of life, then the hypostatized life passes over, by virtue of its blind separation from the other moment, into what is destructive and malevolent, insolent and self-aggrandizing. Whoever hates what is destructive, must hate life along with it: only what is dead is an allegory of what is living and undistorted. Anatole France realized something of this, in his enlightened way. “No,” says the otherwise mild-mannered Mr. Bergeret, “I would rather believe, that organic life is the special illness of our unlovely planet. It would be unbearable to think that there is nothing but eating and being eaten throughout the endless universe.” The nihilistic antipathy in his words is not merely the psychological but also the material precondition of humanity as utopia.'

>>24672536
all true, yes indeed, but the point is precisely to see how different personalities from different cultures at different points in time tried to stretch out their midwit meditations across 200 pages while giving the reader a reason to keep turning the page. so even if the starting point consists of the trivial reflections of a midwit, the end result is an attempt to forge a meaningful shared experience out of the scrap of our private mental lives. and isn't that what it's all about, whether we're talking about literature or civilization or whatever?